


Three Kisses

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s01e10-e11 The Storm/The Eye, Episode: s01e20 The Siege (2), Episode: s02e01 The Siege (3), Episode: s03e10 The Return Part 1, Episode: s03e11 The Return Part 2, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-17 23:44:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1407049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Sparktober</p><p>Three times John and Elizabeth might have kissed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Kisses

The first time John kisses Elizabeth he has just killed sixty men.

Atlantis is silent around them—a deep silence that reverberates through empty halls and spires, the kind of silence that remembers the sounds of rain and fire and the choked gurgles of a man’s last breath. Elizabeth finds John hunched over the railing of a balcony watching the waves whip into a froth around the pier.

“John,” Elizabeth begins, but he doesn’t let her speak. Instead he kisses her with the same single mindedness, the same intensity, the same relentless force he directed at the Genii. He kisses her as if she might disappear, as if he can save her like this, with his body and his mouth and his hands. John is wet and cold in her arms, his flesh gradually warming where they touch. Elizabeth holds on so tightly she knows she must be leaving bruises on John’s shoulders. 

“John,” she tries again, but behind them, the balcony door is whisking open and Rodney’s voice is echoing through the control room, bright and clear and so very alive that the terrible silence must recede. John backs away from her, and Elizabeth sees something lost and wild in his eyes before he locks it away with all his other secrets.

That night as Elizabeth tries to sleep, she tries to imagine Simon—the shape of his face, the play of the muscles in his back underneath her hands, his mouth moving against hers—but all she can think of is John, his desperate urgency, his fierce want, how terribly right she felt when he pressed her against the railing with the wind whipping her wet hair around her face.

John doesn’t kiss her again until the sky is on fire.

The Wraith have lit up the night like the Fourth of July, oranges and reds and blues scudding across the shield and raining down into the sea. The sky is full of beautiful death, and Elizabeth is waiting for the shield to fail and oblivion to come.

But it doesn’t. Atlantis doesn’t fall. She stands tall and proud against a backdrop of stars, and Elizabeth is overcome with the kind of gratitude that most people never feel in a lifetime.

This time when John kisses her, he is almost giddy. He’s coming down from stims like the rest of them and his hands shake when he cups Elizabeth’s jaw, but there’s a joy in him, a triumph, none of the despair from before. This kiss is sweet and tender, and it seems to go on forever. 

“John,” Elizabeth says, but he just puts his finger over her mouth and grins that cocky grin of his, the one that makes her want to slap him and then fuck him into the ground.

Elizabeth sleeps well that night, and when she dreams, she dreams of the sharp point of John’s hip in her palm, his lips brushing over hers, his fingers trembling as they tangle in her hair.

Finally, finally, Elizabeth kisses John. She kisses him on a Tuesday afternoon on Earth with CNN for background music and the full sun streaming through her open windows. She doesn’t kiss John because they’re going to die or because they should have died but didn’t. She doesn’t kiss John because Simon moved on to someone new. Elizabeth kisses John because she wants to, has wanted to, in fact, for a very long time.

John seems so surprised when she leans in and fists her hands in his T-shirt that Elizabeth has to laugh. “What?” she says. “You didn’t really think I asked you over here to discuss personnel changes, did you?”

John shrugs and scrubs his hand over the back of his neck.

“You did,” Elizabeth says. “I’m sorry to disappoint, Lt. Colonel.”

“Who says I’m disappointed?”

Elizabeth kisses John slowly, licking into the seam of his mouth, tracing his lips with her tongue until he shudders and makes the most perfect, hungry noise Elizabeth has ever heard. She peels John’s black shirt up over his head and licks her way down his ribs, over scars and a yellowing bruise that could only have come from one of Teyla’s bantos rods. 

With her hand on John’s zipper, Elizabeth looks up at him, at the pulse jumping in his throat, at his eyes dark with want. In this moment, none of the reasons they’ve kept each other at arm’s length seem to matter, and all the potential consequences of letting herself love this man are worth the risks.

Somehow they end up on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, John moving inside her and knocking another magazine off Elizabeth’s stack of mail on every stroke. Elizabeth’s panties are still braceleted around her left ankle, and she can feel a year’s worth of accumulated dust scratching her behind. Nothing else has ever felt so right.

Later that night, stretched out beside John in her bed and missing the sound of waves, Elizabeth realizes she doesn’t have to wonder anymore if John will ever kiss her again, just how many times before breakfast, and she thinks she’s ready to figure out the answer to that question.


End file.
